


love to be the underdog

by nayanroo



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Kid Fic, child badasses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-21
Updated: 2012-12-21
Packaged: 2017-11-21 23:01:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/603037
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nayanroo/pseuds/nayanroo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Just because the rest of Asgard doesn't believe in them doesn't mean they can't believe in each other.  Long before the illustrious adventures of the princes, the Lady Sif, and the Warriors Three, there were only the princes and Sif, and the barriers they had to face.</p>
            </blockquote>





	love to be the underdog

**Author's Note:**

  * For [siffycup](https://archiveofourown.org/users/siffycup/gifts).



> Beta'd by the wonderful Ammay, finished before the deadline by virtue of divine intervention and a few cups of peppermint mocha. Hope you all enjoy!

In hindsight, Loki thought he probably should have realized this was a very bad idea.

Of course, it had always been hard for him to find a reason _not_ to go with Thor when his brother sings Loki’s siren call of _treasure._ While Thor generally meant treasure of the shiny and golden variety, Loki thought of treasure in different terms. Enchanted items he could study (for he had already learned that to truly understand something, one need only to take it apart to its pieces, and many of the enchantments that seemed complex at first were made of basic things), or better yet, books he could read. The tutors assigned to the two princes knew they had little left they could teach him in the way of history and literature and the spoken word, and had long known there was nothing they could do for his thirst for magical knowledge, but they staunchly refused to let him into the more interesting parts of the library, deep in the ranks of bookshelves piled with scrolls and dusty tomes. They also knew better than to risk the ire of the Allfather and Allmother, who had made it explicitly clear – after an aborted excursion and a very near brush with a magically-trapped book of spells – that Loki was too young for such knowledge and to keep him away until such time as he had proved his maturity and skill. 

He could feel the magic that resided in those forbidden places, though. As he had grown stronger he could feel it like a pulse in his bones, calling out to him. One day, he’d promised himself, he would escape the iron shackles of Master Anundr and Master Eileif, and spend _hours…_

“Loki!”

Hurriedly, Loki cut off his daydreaming and turned his attention back to the matter at hand. While he wished for just a peek at one of the spells he _knew_ had to be in those books, he had convinced his parents that letting him learn a few offensive spells at a time – ones they could read over and approve of first – would help him. If he didn’t nurture his abilities, he reasoned, then when he was actually deemed old enough to learn the more advanced spells, he would be unable to. That would be an embarrassment to himself and to the House of Odin.

With a _push_ of his magic, Loki summoned two tiny silver knives to his hands and flung them out. His timing was precise; one of the knives just nicked Sif’s dark hair as she ducked, but both of them whizzed over her head and buried themselves into the belly of the troll they were trying to take down. At first, all it seemed to do was make the hideous thing mad – but then the knives spat sparks and glowed white hot, the metal melting. Loki stuck his nose into his sleeve to dampen the smell of burning flesh.

“ _Nice_ ,” Sif said, but she was already moving again from her crouch, leaping easily over the troll as it fell and darting off to pick at the ones harrying Thor. Loki followed, using his momentum to carry him over obstacles. The others could laugh at his odd style of running, with its flips and rolls and seemingly exaggerated leaps, but it worked well for him.

“Hundreds of uninhabited caves on this moon that could be the one the treasure’s in,” he said as he caught up to Sif and spun so they were back-to-back, flinging several knives at once to catch oncoming goblins in their throats, “And my brother had to traipse directly to the _only one_ in this area that’s a den of monsters.”

“Oh, Loki,” and Sif’s voice was full of laughter as she swung her pilfered sword, chopping a goblin nearly in half, “This is _fun._ ”

“This is _deadly_ ,” he yelled back, but he had to admit it was nice to flex his magical muscles in front of someone who could appreciate them (and if he was honest, it always felt good when Sif so much as shot him a grin of thanks for some spell he used to take out a foe she hadn’t seen coming), and with her keeping things close to them under control, he could take out oncoming foes farther away. “Where _is_ Thor?”

His question was answered as Thor rode past on some six-legged creature, yelling and brandishing his sword as he clung to the thing’s neck. Loki sighed. Sif grinned.

“See? He’s fine!”

Loki ducked under Sif’s sword as she swung it, taking off the arm of a goblin who had been reaching for him. In turn Loki let loose another barrage of knives and magic, but they’d been keeping it up for so long he was beginning to tire. He could feel it in Sif’s back against his, too, a trembling in young muscles not able to sustain the kind of demands she made on them. When he glanced back at her he could see she’d bared her teeth into a snarl, trying to keep herself from flagging, but her swings were becoming sloppier the longer they went on. Even the tenor of Thor’s yelling changed over time, until even he left off, saving his energy for defending himself.

And this was how they all ended up with their backs to a cliff, feet slipping on rockfall as they scrambled around trying to find a way around the very beast Thor had been riding. It backed them up until the three of them were shoulder-to-shoulder, backs pressed against cold stone, and the six-legged thing was galloping at them with its jaws opened wide to reveal razor-sharp teeth. Loki tried to think of some spell, any spell, anything that would turn it aside, but his tired mind wasn’t cooperating and all he could see were Sif’s eyes getting wider, her lips parting, and on his other side Thor with one of his hands pressed to his side with blood spilling out between his fingers—

Light and heat enveloped them suddenly, and Loki closed his eyes as the Bifrost hooked him just behind his heart and pulled him back up into the sky.

*

“You disobeyed me.”

The two young princes and Sif, fresh from the Healing Rooms, all shifted uneasily under the Allfather’s gaze. They weren’t in Gladsheim, but to Loki it felt like they were. Even the small hall they were in felt like judgment before the full assembled peerage. 

“I made it plain this morning when you asked that you would not go to that moon, that the dangers there were too great for you to handle. I would have thought my two sons would know better than to steal weapons from the armory and go anyway. And not only did you do that, you brought along the daughter of one of my most loyal lords – though her house is not large, Sif is still a noble’s daughter, and it would have shamed the House of Odin even more than you have, to have lost her on this foolish outing!”

“Father,” Loki began slowly, “We did not mean—“

“Silence, Loki!”

He shut his mouth with a snap, and glanced at Sif. She caught his eye and smiled shakily a little when Odin turned his back to pace. 

“Father, it was my idea,” Thor said. Odin held up a hand for him to be silent but when Thor had the bit in his teeth he was as easy to stop as an untrained yearling. “Loki and Sif came along to make sure I would be all right, I did not mean—“

“What you meant does not matter now.” Odin glared at Thor until he subsided, though he still looked rebellious. “Thank the gods all three of you are not severely harmed,” he said. “But that does not mean you are excused from your actions. Sif, go to your father and tell him what happened, and endure whatever punishment he metes out knowing it is what you earn for disobeying your king.”

The smile had vanished just as quickly, but Sif bowed, hand fisted over her head in imitation of the older soldiers. “I am sorry for disobeying you, my king,” she said, and gave the princes a sort of apologetic look as one of Frigga’s handmaidens escorted her out.

Odin watched her go, then looked at Thor and Loki. “Now, as for the two princes of Asgard who insist on acting like unmannered ruffians…”

*

The scolding from his father and mother had been bad; Odin had been as angry as Loki had ever seen him, telling them that he had expected better from them, from a first and second prince of Asgard. Certainly he had not thought they would deliberately disobey his order not to go anywhere without a guard, but to do that and to nearly get themselves and another killed in the process brought shame upon their House. They had been both told to go to their rooms and remain there the rest of the day, and that they were not to leave the palace grounds for another month at least.

That had made Thor turn sullen, even more than the punishment. After that moon, they’d been planning to head to a place on Alfheim that was supposed to have a sage able to grant wishes, and Thor had planned to wish for the strength to lift the mighty hammer in the weapons vault…

Loki sighed, turning the page in his book as he sat crosslegged on one of the benches surrounding the training yards. In the main ring a swordmaster was instructing a group of boys and he watched, in the sort of dispassionate way he was trying to cultivate. He’d noticed it put people off more if he affected an air of general disdain, and at the moment, Loki wasn’t feeling particularly charitable. Between being restricted to the palace meant being unable to escape to any of his more favorable hiding places, meant that he had no excuses to miss his own weapons lessons despite that he showed little interest in sword or spear beyond becoming proficient. He was already more than skilled with his knives.

When the older class finished up, Loki quickly packed up his books into the leather sack he’d had made to hold them and began making his way back inside the palace. If the swordmaster couldn’t find him, he thought, maybe he wouldn’t be expected to make his way through another class full of veiled insults and jibes at his manliness, as though his worth was measured in his ability with a blade. He _had_ blades, and though nobody would openly speak against one of the royal family, there were ways around that. 

As he walked toward the stairs leading inside, he passed a group of children in one of the training yards. A group of them had clustered around two fighters, and in a gap in the circle, he could see Sif was one of the two fighting. Her opponent was one of the older boys from the class he’d just been sitting by; twice her size and older than her by a good fifty years. The comparison was almost comical. Sif was like him, slender with coltish legs, though the fact she was beginning to _develop_ hadn’t escaped him (had, in fact, woken him up in the night a few times in very embarrassing situations) but her small size wasn’t a disadvantage against an opponent broader and physically stronger. She darted in and out of range, working her blunted sword with practiced ease, her dark hair dusty from rolling in the sands she dug her bare feet into.

Loki paused to watch her, adjusting the strap of his bag. She was a skilled fighter already, learning well and quickly, when the swordmasters would let her into their classes. Many of them laughed at her, but when he’d offered to intervene she’d given him a look he had correctly translated into _are you an idiot_ and told him that she’d prove herself and make them see on her own.

A shout went up; Sif had managed to knock her opponent onto his back, his sword skidding across the ground out of his hand. She looked triumphant for half a moment, moving to put the point of her sword at his throat and get him to yield, but went down as he kicked her legs out from under her and flipped on top of her, pinning her down to the sands. Loki wanted to jump forward, to speak up in her defense, but felt rooted to the spot. If he stepped in he’d probably just be brought into it too. The other children didn’t always have the same kind of aversion to speaking ill of a prince as the adults did, and Sif hated it when she felt that someone was doing something for her.

“Stupid _girl_!” he shouted, red in the face. “If you hadn’t gone with the princes yesterday, they’d never have gotten into trouble! That’s all you do, you just cause trouble!” The onlookers took up the taunting as the older boy climbed off Sif, kicking sand over her in a fit of pique.

“Stupid!”

“Sif Horse-face!”

“Go back to your skirts and dolls, you don’t belong here!”

“Shut up!” Sif yelled at all of them, sitting up and glaring round at all of them. “He cheated! I had him on the ground!”

But the boys just laughed at her and left, and Loki edged behind a rack of spears so that they wouldn’t see him and decide to have a little more fun. When they’d passed inside, he went over to where Sif was getting to her feet and dusting sand off her leathers. She had that pinch-faced look she got when she was trying not to cry, and wisely, Loki didn’t call attention to it.

“You did well,” he said quietly. Sif kept her back to him for a moment, and when she looked over her shoulder, he could see her eyes were red rimmed, though there were no tear-tracks on her cheeks.

“He cheated,” she muttered. “He has no honor.”

“Technically,” Loki said slowly, “He didn’t cheat.”

“It still wasn’t fair!”

“Life isn’t fair,” Loki replied, trying to make himself sound world-weary and experienced, but it just came out kind of trite, and he winced as Sif spun to face him, putting his hands up and hastily backpedaling. “What I mean to say is that enemies won’t always fight fair, not on the battlefield or the training yards or the court. Just because you have honor does not mean they will.”

She narrowed her eyes at him, but sighed, scooping up her sword and putting it on one of the racks nearby. “You are right, I suppose…” She rested her fingertips on the pommel. “I hit him hard enough to draw blood with this.”

“He’ll be smarting for days, no doubt,” Loki told her. He doubted that would be the case – the older boys were full of swagger and bluster and though they wouldn’t forget the insult she’d offered them, they’d write it off as a fluke. People always took his own successes for the same, just like Sif’s, and no matter what either of them did it seemed like to the rest of Asgard, his magic and Sif’s skill with a weapon would be little more than curiosities.

Still, the sentiment made Sif grin at him, and Loki felt buoyed by that. “C’mon,” she said. “Let’s go inside, I need to clean that idiot’s sweat off me. Then we can find your brother.”

“I believe he is with his tutors and will probably appreciate the intervention.”

“Then we’d better not waste time.”

As he trailed after her into the palace, Loki allowed himself an unguarded grin. Sword training or no, today was surely a good day.


End file.
